Representations and scientific realism

EPISTEMOLOGIA ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 13-29
Author(s):  
Evandro Agazzi
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Mathematical Representations ◽  
Scientific Representations ◽  
Epistemological Dualism ◽  
Operational Criteria ◽  
Sense And Reference ◽  
Physical Phenomena

When it is spoken of scientific representations it is often understood that science can offer "only" representations but does not enable us to know reality. This tenet is the inheritance of a gratuitous and inconsistent presupposition that affected modern philosophy during almost two centuries, according to which we know our representations and not things, and we have to find warranties in order to believe that such representations correspond to reality (epistemological dualism). The present paper analyzes this presupposition, shows its inconsistency and, through a discourse regarding the relations between thought and ontology, between sense and reference of the intellectual constructions, between abstract encoding of properties and concrete exemplification of the same by means of operational criteria of reference, justifies the cognitive purport of scientific representations, including the mathematical representations of physical phenomena.

Historical Narrative: A Dispute Between Constructionism and Scientific Realism

Human Affairs ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Václav Černík ◽  
Jozef Viceník
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Naive Realism ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Naïve Realism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Objective Meaning ◽  
Sense And Reference

Historical Narrative: A Dispute Between Constructionism and Scientific RealismAn intense discussion about the issue of historical narrative arose during the time when the naïve realism of classical historiography was being critiqued and led to a dispute, in the last century, between constructionism and critical or scientific realism. We can distinguish between constructionism and noetic constructivism. According to ontological constructionism all facts are human constructions; according to noetic constructivism, our notions and theories are constructs with objective meaning (sense and reference); they refer to objective reality. Scientific realism recognizes the existence of noetic construction but does not regard facts as our constructions, as pure fictions. The point of contention is the question over whether historical narrative is merely a discursive construction or whether it is also a scientific reconstruction of the past. Resolving the dispute over whether historical narrative can be objectively true, or whether it is subject to empirical control or not, is dependent on finding the answer to this question.

Mechanism, in modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack MacIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
The Universe

Mechanism is the view that the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical background for the explanation of all happenings in the physical universe. Early modern authors, whether mechanists or not, assumed that the matter composing these particles was one and the same throughout the universe. With very few exceptions, they also assumed that there were immaterial entities such as human minds (or souls) and angels. This view, which became the dominant one during the seventeenth century, had earlier precursors, both in classical times and in the Renaissance period, but the major earlier view, following Aristotle, explained the behaviour of material things in virtue of their form or nature: snow was white because it was the kind of thing that was white: it was the nature of snow to be white. By this ‘way of dispatching difficulties, they make it very easy to solve All the Phænomena of Nature in Generall, but make men think it impossible to explicate almost Any of them in Particular’, said Robert Boyle, adding that it was only the ‘Comprehensive Principles of the Corpuscularian Philosophy’ which would allow unmysterious explanations of physical phenomena (Boyle 1999, 5: 300–1). However, many of the things mechanism was invoked to explain – gravity and magnetism, for example – remained inexplicable on simple mechanistic accounts. Nonetheless, one important and lasting result of ‘the mechanical philosophy’ was the acceptance of the requirement that all explanations be understandable, that is, explicable in terms of elementary particles and their motion. In the hands of thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton this led to a reliance on experience and experiment, often controlled and quantified experiments, in place of the older, Aristotelian, model which viewed science as involving the deduction of necessary, universal, truths, from premises which were themselves necessary.

The Interpretation of Line Profiles

1977 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 191-215
Author(s):  
G.B. Rybicki
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Fields ◽  
Atomic Physics ◽  
Velocity Fields ◽  
Spectral Lines ◽  
Inhomogeneous Structure ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Line Profiles ◽  
Physical Phenomena

Observations of the shapes and intensities of spectral lines provide a bounty of information about the outer layers of the sun. In order to utilize this information, however, one is faced with a seemingly monumental task. The sun’s chromosphere and corona are extremely complex, and the underlying physical phenomena are far from being understood. Velocity fields, magnetic fields, Inhomogeneous structure, hydromagnetic phenomena – these are some of the complications that must be faced. Other uncertainties involve the atomic physics upon which all of the deductions depend.

TEM visualization of surface replicated acid and base catalyzed sol-gel glasses

1986 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 448-449
Author(s):  
George C. Ruben ◽  
Merrill W. Shafer
Keyword(s):  
Elevated Temperatures ◽  
Sol Gel ◽  
Basic Medium ◽  
Glass Transition Point ◽  
Structural Space ◽  
Acid And Base ◽  
Organometallic Precursors ◽  
New Processing ◽  
Gel Glasses ◽  
Physical Phenomena

Traditionally ceramics have been shaped from powders and densified at temperatures close to their liquid point. New processing methods using various types of sols, gels, and organometallic precursors at low temperature which enable densificatlon at elevated temperatures well below their liquidus, hold the promise of producing ceramics and glasses of controlled and reproducible properties that are highly reliable for electronic, structural, space or medical applications. Ultrastructure processing of silicon alkoxides in acid medium and mixtures of Ludox HS-40 (120Å spheres from DuPont) and Kasil (38% K2O &62% SiO2) in basic medium have been aimed at producing materials with a range of well defined pore sizes (∼20-400Å) to study physical phenomena and materials behavior in well characterized confined geometries. We have studied Pt/C surface replicas of some of these porous sol-gels prepared at temperatures below their glass transition point.

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